Flirting with the enemy...

Does that title sound a little adulterous? For the record - TV is "the enemy" with whom I flirted.

No, what this refers to is last night, when I got back from my run to find that Emily was trying to finish her last netflix movie: "The Invention of Lying". Sounds like a funny movie - I saw the preview before we had put it on our netflix preview (this of course was before I stopped watching TV), and my parents saw it about a week ago, and also said it was pretty good. It's a little sad to know that I'll probably never see it... c'est la vie. :-)

Anyway, when I got back from my run, the computer was sitting on the kitchen counter, and windows media player was open and frozen. Emily seems to think that when I walk in and she's just paused a movie that it some how incriminates her, even though I really don't care. "I was just gonna watch a few minutes, but it keeps freezing!" She's cute. Without waiting for a response, my days as a computer repair guy kicked in and I closed the frozen application and tried to restart it for her before I got in the shower.  Hazaaah! Fixed it lickity-split. And there was the movie's main menu, right there in front of me, the play button just waiting to be clicked. Emily said, "Oh! Thanks!" subtly hinting that I should, "step away from the TV." (Imagine a police type voice blairing over a cop car speaker for that second quotation.)

Being the model of self-discipline that I've been these days, I walked away. That's what I'd like to say - if we were in the movie I did not get to watch, I could say that, and you would believe it. (See the preview and you'll understand.)  No, I clicked play first, and then walked away. Why did I do that? I could tell you that it was the computer repair guy in me just wanting to make sure that it wouldn't freeze again once trying to play the movie, but that wouldn't be true. The honest answer is that it just brought me a little closer to the movie I knew that I didn't get to watch. This is really such a ridiculously tiny lapse in discipline amidst what I would call a fantastic success so far, but it just makes me wonder - why is it so hard to let go of things?

In Romans, Paul says, "We know that the law is holy. But I am not. I have been sold to be a slave of sin. I don't understand what I do. I don't do what I want to do. Instead, I do what I hate to do. I do what I don't want to do." I hear ya loud and clear Paul - though I have some reservations about the word "hate" in reference to TV, because I actually love it.

Today's temptation rating: 5.1

Days without incident: 28 (FOUR WEEKS!... If I started on February 1st, I could say it's been a whole month!)